Splash No. 169 - The Podcast Dilemma

The Podcast Dilemma 

Since high school, I’ve always had a pair of headphones on hand, always a few seconds away from popping them in my ears and playing something. For the longest time, it was just music, something to soundtrack my life: a beat to walk to, an atmosphere to color my work, lyrics to add interest to a boring task. I’d constantly be listening to new music when I wanted to make a task more interesting or listening to my favorite albums to spice up the silence of everyday life. But after some time, I discovered podcasts.

In the last few years, podcasts have replaced music as my main source of audio entertainment. At first, I mainly listened to story-based podcasts like This American Life and Serial, but in recent years, and especially during the pandemic, I mostly listen to conversational podcasts like How Long Gone, where the hosts have casual conversations with their guests about their lives. Unlike the story-based podcasts, you can zone in and out while listening to these, catching humorous anecdotes when you want, while being able to focus on other things, or at least it feels like it. And because of this quality, it’s become easier and easier to fill any moment of silence with the voices of some podcaster or another. Or maybe a more accurate description is drowning out my internal dialogue with the external dialogue of these dudes blathering. Often, the hosts and their guests would talk about the small ways that their lives were more glamorous and exciting than mine, which was particularly appealing during the days spent at home in the last year. 

Thinking of this type of escapism reminded me of a quote from Hanif Abdurraqib’s  They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us about music, which also applies here:

An appeal that music offers us is a way to escape our understanding of the world. It is working within a food chain of sorts, particularly in rap music. A rapper boasts about a life that they may be close to living, but not entirely living, giving a listener a chance to rap along those words and briefly, even though it is not real, get closer to the image of a life separate from their own.

The other day I listened to a podcast where the hosts talked about how their fans would often start talking to them like they weren’t strangers, continuing a conversation that they had never started, offering banter that suggested a nonexistent familiarity. The host explained that it was why he didn’t love to interact with his fans and chalked it up to the nature of the medium — while musicians and other artists interacted with their fans through edited and sometimes abstruse works of art, these podcasters laid themselves bare for their work by presenting their conversations for consumption. There was no room for interpretation for them, the work was simply them being themselves, and what could be more personal than feeling like you were just hanging out with your favorite podcaster? And because there’s no room for interpretation, it feels like it’s much less energy for a terrible attention span like mine to attend to.

While the simplicity of podcasts makes it easy to listen to them all the time, I wonder if they’re just a shallower form of entertainment than music. One time, I spent an hour of my time listening to a high-quality version of Frank Ocean’s Endless on my friend’s nice headphones, completely focused on the music. Nearly 4 years later, I still fondly reflect on the experience as a special moment in my life. The album that I had heard dozens of times revealed new layers, and my greater attention to it turned the music into a visceral, nearly out-of-body experience. I struggle to imagine that even the best interview by some funny guys talking to Phoebe Bridgers could ever offer such an experience, even if I had the best pair of headphones in the world.

So lately, I’ve been reflecting on the times that I have really enjoyed music recently.  More often than not, it’s the times when I can just let the music play without letting my twitchy lizard brain reach over and change it every few minutes: while driving, while skipping rope, or running. I wonder how I could reinforce this behavior in my every day and let myself fall back in love with the beauty and breadth of what music can offer. I think about buying an iPod once again, a fancy pair of headphones, and giving myself time to just lose myself in the notes and tones that I’ve forgotten — to let the spell of the sonic enchant me once again.

Drops of the Week
 

• PLAYLIST - nothing hurts anymore - I made this playlist of songs that help me relax and feel like I'm just floating.

• ARTICLE - "Envy Brain" by Haley Nahman - really enjoyed this newsletter that not only dug into the concept of envy, but also had Haley admit her own experience of envy, which felt validating (I am also a deeply envious person, though it's often hard to admit it).

• POEM - "Dawn Revisited" by Rita Dove - a good morning poem

With each day, we can move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
 

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Soundly,
Nikhil